»At twelve, I had begun to think about death as a possibility of life. I had just found a new book: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. At my age, I was perhaps a little young for this book, but I’d been able to read since I was five and I had read it before. The painful passivity of Hans Castorp during his seven years’ sanatorial stint got to me. Below the polished prose I could sense the presence of the reaper and his unhurried rites. In that summer, I first noticed all the weirdos on the street, and I wondered if I would be one of them. Who decided who and what you became? Who’d look after me if I made a wrong step? I was beginning to lose trust in my parents in this regard: they were fornicating without thinking that I might hear them. They were probably ready for me to move out. I often feared for my sanity then, because I experienced myself as living with two minds in two bodies: I was both surging with energy and constantly sleepy. It was as if I was stuck in an egg: my legs were kicking and my arms were holding on to the shell. Stonefaced, I looked in the mirror for long periods of time waiting for a spontaneous eruption of my skin or the emergence of a monster that had lain dormant behind my eyes. In those days of summer, I couldn’t stand my home, not only because my progenitors had rekindled the hot passion of their quickly withering youth, but also because I longed for the calm presence of books. I found what I needed in a local book store whose owner let me grumble, browse or just doze with a novel on my knees. The shop favored borrowing over buying, which was agreeable to my meagre allowance. The store was built into an old Kreuzberg flat that had seen much better days. Most apartments in Kreuzberg had. There were sofas and arm chairs to rest upon, and there were mysterious corners and forbidden doors to entertain my fantasy life. Over the period of a few weeks, I had investigated all rooms and nooks, I had lifted every wall carpet and painting looking for a hidden safe and I had opened small and large doors everywhere except one, a bright blue door that was in a short hallway between two other rooms. I’d always found it locked. If I wanted to own this place, I had to conquer this door also, and I had to do it alone.«

]]>http://marcusspeh.com/2014/09/22/tales-of-another-country/feed/43534641337_f358d6101a_omarcusspehNew Fortuna Glacier, 1915 / photographed by Frank HurleyState of Mindhttp://marcusspeh.com/2014/09/11/state-of-mind/
http://marcusspeh.com/2014/09/11/state-of-mind/#commentsThu, 11 Sep 2014 20:13:34 +0000http://marcusspeh.com/?p=11281]]>»The old man thought solely lonely, admittedly prudent, but rarely happy thoughts; thoughts as sturdy, as serenely savvy, as sorrowfully stable in their shrewd sanity that a tree in winter might have thought them if a tree could think. His thoughts and feelings had converged so that they were almost indistinguishable from one another: in his mind, ideas languished motionlessly, and had done for decades. Emotions no longer set anything into motion. Language, too, once a weapon, a sword, a skill, had become a cloak to wrap oneself in, against the dying of one’s day, against the emptying of one’s mind. Matter mattered less now. Vanity vanished. What had once seemed ungainly and enormous turned into ephemera. The fabric of everything lay bare, open to the seeing eye, its threads terrifyingly thin. Being otherworldly in this world was no feast for the weak.«

Image source: Internet Archive of Book Images

]]>http://marcusspeh.com/2014/09/11/state-of-mind/feed/014580373740_19a8e3e31a_zmarcusspeh14782056571_f513293daa_zBook Bakinghttp://marcusspeh.com/2014/06/11/book-baking/
http://marcusspeh.com/2014/06/11/book-baking/#commentsWed, 11 Jun 2014 19:33:42 +0000http://marcusspeh.com/?p=11152]]>»What is as much yours as you are yourself,and what is as little yours as you are yourself?« Augustine asked long ago, and we begin planning a book without having an answer ready, with an open mouth, a fly catching orifice.

The first step in writing is to bring the people to life on the page. Before you can do that you must imagine them, live with them in your mind, and long before that you must dream them up like a patisseur dreams up cupcakes without worrying about customers, but simply to elevate his own consciousness, coddle his cupcakeness, to entertain his heart, to sweeten the creative deal lest it becomes a deal with the devil, generating beauty not out of reverie and substance but out of hubris and soil. The paradox of all art: is it just for me, or does it go beyond me? Alas, there is not the tiniest space left between those two tempers.

The year is 1000 A.D. The character at hand, on the tip of one’s pen as it were, is a young woman of no more than 15 years, her name is Gisela, who one day as if in a dream becomes queen of a brand new kingdom. But it’s not an altogether pleasant dream: if it were a piece of music it would be an overture, an opening to an unknown future – the first queen of a non-nation, a horde, even if she’s only a girl and comes from far away like a fairy princess, has no power over the minds of the subjects to fall back on — she feels as alone as an orphan, and she is in dire need of an angel who advises her to keep calm and carry on, to uphold one’s faith at the bloody birth of the new realm. She’s small and young in years, but her fate weighs heavily on the globe: it’s going to be a triumph for christendom, and this part of the story is true.

There is the husband, the king, also young, no more than 25, but to his advantage he was bred to be what he has become, Stephen is his Christian name, but born was he as Vajk. Why, the girl had seen herself not as a prince’s bride but as an ugly swan among the sisters of mercy, hidden away in a convent, innocent, very much taken care of, very little challenged except by prayer and self-sacrifice, carried out alone or in small groups of strong women. But the good Lord to whom she’s been given to by name, which means “God’s hostage”, knows better than she what strength she has and what she will be able to do, he knows even what it is she will actually do, as we do not, not being gods ourselves but privileged to live a thousand years later…or is it a privilege and not perhaps a loss? Sometimes when I wake up from having spent a dream in Gisela’s company, I am not so sure, I ache a little for the sureness of the people of old.

Of course this is only an outline of the cupcakes to be but an important one. A character has been established, foes and friends will fly to her on the strength of the wings of the dream. White wings for a good dream, black wings for a bad dream. Only now can we begin to ask: what should she do next? Where does she want to be? Who can help? What do those ‘subjects’ really feel about their young queen – not as an anonymous crowd but as a butcher, a washer woman, a pub crawler, a page at court, a shaman, and so on. Perhaps even as a horse because horses and animals respond to her kind heart as if they knew a child was hiding behind that famous royal mantle.

Then, of course, our treatment would be poorer, wouldn’t be a dramatic treatment at all, if we didn’t also present the former prince’s, now king’s, position: he’s nobody’s fool. Nobody has had more opportunity to plan, anticipate and prepare for the state both children find themselves in. And if marriage is denounced, with disarming, charming simplicity to be “about nothing but love, plain and simple” by modem public service announcements, it is so much more than that to this medieval man: he is to look in his heart for love, make space for it. Wasn’t it at first to him mainly about keeping a truce with the German emperor, and about showing his people that he is serious about leadership? And next to that, and this he underestimated, marriage is a sacrament, a holy set of vows spoken not just for the ears of mortals, but spoken into a remembering wind that blows a thousand years or more. In those days, breaking your vows with heaven really meant something. Something starkly sinister: innocence was irretrievably lost in the process, and nobody knew what else.

Back to the king: every night now, the body of the princess, now wife, now queen, in his bed, next to him. A body surprisingly (why?) supple and sincerely employed by it’s inhabiting soul to please, but without any of the cunning and craftiness that the young king has known, seen, experienced with other women before as a young nobleman. Love did not enter in during those encounters. He floated on the surface while he now, with Gisela, sunk fast and deep, sunk to depths where he didn’t know himself from a simple lad. Those ladies of the easy lay, he’d received them in secret, on the initiative and the insistence of his uncle who turned out to be a heathen and an usurper for the throne – a devil incarnate, so that the king had to hang, impale and quarter him and nail his remains to the gates of the four cities that swore him their oath. Which is where they built the first four churches, on the bones and the blood of the temptor. Further West, they’ll immortalize him in stone as he rides, in full royal attire, into Bamberg Cathedral. Perhaps he is a fool after all? Or perhaps he’s just a (holy) daredevil.

There you have it all: two characters, stubborn and strong, and a curtain ready for the lifting above a sanguine story of love, but not only love, also sadness and loss, and finally, as always, abandonment and death. But many, many years in between. Not a fairy tale, not a tall tale, not a myth, but a kaleidoscope of images from the inside of my head, mixed with what happened.

“What is as much yours as you are yourself, and what is as little yours as you are yourself?”, asked a rather relaxed Augustine 1500 hundred years ago, and one answer to the riddle, according to him, is that it is our own self that we possess and yet do not possess. A paradox lies at the center of our being, why should it not also lie at the center of every book worth writing? This is it never clearer than when we begin baking a new book.

Background: This summer, I’m putting final touches to the manuscript of “Gizella”, to be published by Folded Word Press in 2015. With a very large cast of characters. The germ for this meditation came from Augustine’s quote — it has also proven fruitful recently in another essay on the “Pentecostal Paradox” (in German). All images (except the photo of the statue of Stephen) are by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528).

]]>http://marcusspeh.com/2014/06/11/book-baking/feed/0marcusspehaugustinesaint-apolloniaweeping-angel-boy-1521fourwitchesaugustineEaster Essencehttp://marcusspeh.com/2014/04/19/easter-essence/
http://marcusspeh.com/2014/04/19/easter-essence/#commentsSat, 19 Apr 2014 09:55:27 +0000http://marcusspeh.com/?p=11105]]>At Easter the common folks bring their eggs to the Lord. The lidless leveret lies in the grave, its open eyes directed upwards in death. The egg goes into the Easter bread: it is blamed on the lagomorph. Mixed images: resurrection and spawning, the hare as chicken, the sidestepping and egg painting, the instinct to flee before the crucifixion and after, Saturday’s search for the buried, the Hidden, and above all the sweetness rising from the sadness like a naked fog and dissolving on the tongue when the chocolate egg melts. Stubbornly we move to safety from the power of the old pictures. Rites and processions take place in backyards: their participants are like ghosts. Sung incantations that connect heaven and earth vanish as soon as the first warmth of spring arrives. What is the essence? What is the truth of our time? What forms the center of the egg whose center is an egg?[German original: Versuch über Ostern; en français: Essence de Pâques]

…The Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” —Book of Genesis 11,5-7

If the bible says the truth, then there’s something potentially dangerous about speaking only one language. What could it be? “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly“[1] if our tongues were no longer split in different directions?

In Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Babel fish, a telepathic universal translator, is described as “a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.“[2] Though the argument is about as deep as the rest of the book, it suggests that language may be linked to a “Deep Magic” as C.S. Lewis might have said[3]. What is the nature of this magic? Can it be made or unmade? Can it be learnt or must it be inherited?

Language clearly is more than sound waves, just as mastering language is more than learning patterns, just as speaking is more than being a parrot. Language can set the tone for our dialogue with the divine: in Franz Werfel’s novel Song of Bernadette, the apparition of the Virgin Mary speaks not in any language, but in Occitan[4], the vernacular spoken by the poor people of Lourdes. But which of the many tongues spoken is shared by God, if any?

I’ve been talking and writing about bilingual writing for a while now – on my blog, where I rather flippantly called myself a “linguistic cross-dresser” once[5], and in interviews[6]. In fact, as soon as people find out that I write both in English and in German, they are likely to ask: why? Why don’t you just stick to your mother tongue?

In the past I stayed away from the deeper aspects of this question, the aspects that concern the nature of language. Instead, I responded on the level of pattern-making, of language as a plaything, as something that is manipulated, bent into multiple shapes – a craftsman’s reply, fair enough given my own ongoing struggle with two tongues on the paper.

But I don’t feel or think that this response is sufficient any longer. I say this at the end of many months of trying hard to break up my own work habits, of identifying the pieces of my mind puzzle in order to fully control my bilinguality. I did this out of hubris and out of hunger: the hubris came from several years of (more or less) successfully going back and forth between English and German; the hunger came from my desire to be able to produce fiction for a market, be it English or German. I wanted to get rid of my inhibitions against writing in German or English depending on the topic, the genre and the form. And a German literary agent had told me that she needed something written in German and not in English. So I applied myself to the task using all the analytical tools that I know and my considerable discipline of writing fast and in bulk (helped by my relatively new habit of dictating my text instead of typing or writing them by hand).

Did I succeed? Did I gain the independence of language in writing I’d sought? The answer is no. But I don’t think that I failed myself in the process. Because I am beginning to understand what I’ve hinted at above: that language is not just some stuff to sculpt with; that its spirit had better not be probed with scientific tweezers; that EVERYONE “speaking the same language” might not an apparent paradise of communication, but likely hell on earth.

Nowhere is the faith in a common tongue as strong as on the Internet. Since I’ve been around, at least since the early 1990s, the homogenization of language has continued: not surprisingly, since the medium isn’t just a reflection of the culture but also creates its own culture, one which includes a language. This language is different from English, or from German for that matter; it is becoming the biblical Babel’s idiom, the babble of billions who believe that “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them“. I’m no longer one of them. I’ve weighed my linguistic limits and found them wanting. Now, I once again believe in language as a mystery, something that comes to you not as clay to be moulded, but as a marvel. Does this position constrain me? It surely does, but with it comes a spiritual depth that I would not want to miss.

My new position touches not only upon the inner but also upon the outer world: if language is a mystery instead of a tool, then writing is a mystical experience instead of a job, and a book is a miracle instead of a product. For me, this is more than a sea change: it’s like the two-fold realization that there is (1) an entire world behind the world I knew, and (2) that I cannot ignore that new world.

When you live in a room with curtains, it makes all the difference whether you believe the curtains cover a window or a wall. If they cover a window, you must draw them if you want to see. If they cover a wall, drawing them or not drawing them becomes a matter of degree rather than destiny.

On the net, language sensibility seems limited to Karl Marx’ view as a “practical, real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does it also exist for me.» That this consciousness is near-global is again a matter of degree, it does not fulfill the promise of language as a channel to another dimension.

I’m still somewhat excited about globalization but I’m also increasingly baffled by its paradoxes, like: the paranoia of politically correctness vs. the delightful diversity of the heart; standardized communication in the name of marketing and money-making vs. the costly human desire to muddle things up creatively and clumsily.

To me, the world, viewed from the keyboard, looks rather increasingly like Edith Wharton’s view of the libretto in The Age Of Innocence: »An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.« What if the global mind has gloriously woken up from its slumber only to enter an electronic nightmare?

I have not said much about the origin of my change of heart. It’s very personal and lies beyond the scope of this essay. Only this much: I took up singing. Singing is a form of prayer — it hardly matters if you have a religion or a God. It takes one outside, it draws the curtains without one’s conscious approval.

As a writer, I’ve always believed in hard, continuous work: writing, writing, writing. I imported this practice from the rest of my life since I felt I had done well. I always knew that I was on a long journey. Its beginning, a few years ago, was filled with wonderful encounters on and off the page, on and off the screen. And at the end of this period, I even published a book which was bliss and a blessing both.

Now, I experience myself much more as traveling within. I am much less driven and I write little – not because I feel blocked but because I lack the ambition to push through at any price, no matter where to. I’m inspired by reading how Cormac McCarthy works[7]: »I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.«

I used to obsess about time — the time during the day, in the week or during the holidays available for writing; the time left in my life to write; the time stolen from me by myself, by others etc. Now, rather than obsess about time, I wait.

I used to torture myself with goals: I always had one, and I didn’t believe anything could be achieved without a clear goal. I would enforce striving to reach the goal against my health and against my own conscience and, again, against time. Now, rather than race towards an invisible finishing line, I have faith.

The image of my own process has altered quite dramatically in the past six months: I feel as if I’m drifting around the edges of a giant ice shelf. I’m hoping to dislodge a floe, I’m waiting for an opening in the ice, I’m trying to be ready for it, but that is all. Writing has become an act of grace rather than of bricklaying. I have abandoned the Tower but I’ll never be sorry that I was tempted by its splendour.

As an unperfect actor on the stageWho with his fear is put besides his part, Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage, Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart. —William Shakespeare (from: Sonnet 23)

It’s been a while since I read publicly from my work. Two years to be exact — my last appearances were in November 2011 when I read the Berlin-based short story “Berlin Pastoral” to a London audience, and in Berlin in July 2012 after another story had been shortlisted in a competition. But until last night I had never been on stage alone, without other writers preceding or following my act. It was not entirely “gemütlich”: I felt awkward and nervous all day and I only figured out why shortly before the event itself. The reading took place at a lovely, cozy English bookstore, Shakespeare and Sons, located in Berlin’s trendy Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, called “LSD Kiez” by the locals (nothing to do with drugs, just a pun on street names), a stone’s throw away from my own apartment. Though the Internet made it look like a global worldwide launch, it was actually a very neighborly event — underlined by the living room quality of the bookshop. Soft light, wooden floors, comfortable old recliners and a sofa, the smell of home baked bagels, coffee and tea, sugar dusted chocolate muffins against the November chill and the rain whipping against the window panes… Quite the opposite of the House of Usher or the Wembley Arena (two other venues that I could imagine would go well with the titular brazenness of “Thank You For Your Sperm“). The House of Usher has fallen of course, and Germans are not welcome at Wembley for the time being (it’s a football thing). The awkwardness: personal stuff in the book, personally read by me in what felt like a personal space…too much intimacy for comfort. Reviews (like this one in HTMLGIANT) have pointed out that the autobiographical quality of many of the flashes in TYFYS is palpable.

Hence, I opted for the selection of stories less personal, like “Electric Eyes”, “Men on Mars”(from the more pleasant stories), and “The Sodomized Dictator” and “Before the Bloodbath” (from the less pleasant ones). To not end on too sombre a note, I finished up with “Arachnophobia”, an unpublished piece. The section of the book titled “The Serious Writer” garnered the greatest interest — but when I responded by reading “The Serious Writer And His Hamster”, the mood went way down (it’s a sad & true story, this one) so that I had to follow up and now really close with “Freedom Ties” (originally published in Berlin’s English LitMag SAND) — one of my favorite tiny pieces, perhaps only because it contains Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Some of these actors that I identify with a black and white age of past glory, etiquette and civilization, simply spread good vibes even when only mentioned by name.

The audience was generous with applause (in fact once they applauded after the first piece they realized that it would be rude not to applaud after every subsequent piece so that they were trapped in their own magnanimity).

Audience during the reading of “Thank You For Your Sperm”

Their questions delighted me also, because they caught me by surprise (despite many interviews that somehow were forgotten all at once): who are my influences? [Mentioned: Baudelaire, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Borges. Though currently I’m reading Raymond Chandler, Leon De Winter, Norman Mailer, Robert Harris…hard-boiled he-men] Did you do animation for these flashes? [No, I thought about it, but no time and no real skill but I think it’s a wonderful idea! Awkword Paper Cut has recently made a video for one of my flashes, “Reading for Writers“.] What’s my next publication? [Gizella, a novel in flashes, from Folded Word Press; writing a mystery.] I had somewhat agonized before about including flashes from “Gizella”. I decided against it and the reason came to me only after the question had been asked: the novel is not finished and its flashes are quite fragile and more poetic than my other work. This may be because the whole book is written from a female point of view, or perhaps it’s because most of those flashes have not been published online: online publishing, via literary magazines or blogs, can have a workshop effect on one’s writing. It’s almost as if the readers out there, with whom, on average, there’s more communication than, say, with the people who bought a print copy of TYFYS, help the writer finish the text. Sometimes quite literally (by commenting), but more often because when I put something online, I tend to polish and edit the heck out of it. This is simply something that the flashes from the new book have not experienced. “Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart“: love in abundance doesn’t mean certainty of closure…

I’m grateful for this evening, for having had such a wonderful audience and such a warm and welcoming venue to read in. Perhaps if I had lived in the US (or even in the UK) I’d have done a lot more of these readings — as it stands, this may well have been the first and the last. Even more reason to cherish the opportunity!

[Photos above: F., P. and U.G. were nice enough to shoot some pics][Also, feast your eye on the gallery of postcards that were posted all around town prior to the event, below!]

The man without a stomach who digests with his skin. The five Asian women who, as individuals, have lost all their senses, but when they hold hands, they can see, smell, hear, taste, feel. The fat American woman who can throw herself under a Berlin tram without suffering any damages (except when she gets up afterwards she swears like a trooper). The African couple who roar like a lion and his lioness. The Siberian mouth harpist who plays beautifully without harp. The ten single-toed men from Atlanta, Georgia, who are married to ten women from Oracle, Ohio, who have no feet at all. All mormons, but especially four of them, a baby girl, a teenage boy, a grown-up woman and an old man, who would turn a salt lake into a blooming meadow if God commanded them to. Six Albanian peasants who speak with the lost tongues of Atlantis. A woman from California in Berlin, who can bring her avatars to life: when she switches off her computers, the avatars become silvery fish and are released into the river from where, after a long journey, they reach the open sea. Fifteen fishing Polish women who can walk on the water. The boy from Singapore whose sweat turns into perfume. The Australian man with calluses at his feet that are one thousand years old. A tree in Chile who once was a cowboy from Texas. A Roman who can bleed from his feet when he prays with fervour. Three Irish truckers whose hands turn grown women into virgins. A prostitute in Lima, Peru, and another one in Greenland who know the future of their clients. The immortal man who wandered the earth for six thousand years as an Egyptian, a Jew, a Greek philosopher, a Catholic priest, and, lately, a little tired from all the walking, a New York bartender with a great sense of humour.

]]>http://marcusspeh.com/2013/08/10/holi-%e0%a4%b9%e0%a5%8b%e0%a4%b2%e0%a5%80-day/feed/0marcusspehHoli DaysBogle’s Bricolagehttp://marcusspeh.com/2013/06/28/bogles-bricolage/
http://marcusspeh.com/2013/06/28/bogles-bricolage/#commentsFri, 28 Jun 2013 17:00:32 +0000http://marcusspeh.com/?p=10727]]>At Fictionaut, writer and inveterate genre/form-maker Ann Bogle started a discussion, as she does, on marginalia and ephemera, which somehow matches other discussions I’ve had over the past few days with different friends from different countries, in different places, on and off the net.

Over in the Alt Litgossip corner of the Web I see artists and writers continually whip up a storm in a small glass using a tiny box of tools. A lot of their work strikes me as “ephemeral” in the sense of self-conscious bricolage in which Ann uses the term to describe something artistic rather than accidental. With her history and literati glitz glistering throughout the pieces she adds something else to the mix that makes it even more special and original. I admire the experimental fervor of Ann and others, as in this excerpt from “WπHπAπT 2″, a text that is stupendously modern, bypassing post-modern movement melancholy and leaving it in the dust much like Tao Lin’s “Taipei” bypasses Beckett’s ennui and completes it for 21st century use:

Later I started a movement to define experimental fiction called WπHπAπT, and the two men I invited in an email to join did not reply, and I did not follow up. The blog post I titled WπHπAπT is based on that email and is shielded from view at Ana Verse. It is not a manifesto but asks whether experimental fiction must include territory besides “nonlinear marginalized sex writing,” as described in many reviews online of Biting the Error, reviews that turned out to be perhaps sales-sexy but incomplete in describing the book. WπHπAπT with its pi signs denotes the way the inquiry felt and follows in strategy those inventors in language I estimate highly.

I am very different: when I am experimental, innovative or original it happens rather despite myself; all I ever aspire to do is tell a story in a traditional manner; but how do you walk a straight line when you perceive the horizon itself as bent irretrievably out of shape?

“Monk by the sea”, Caspar David Friedrich (1808)

Dialoguing with Ann feels incestuous. She’s like a younger, wilder sister, only older. She incinerates herself on her own altar. She wears white lace lingerie when she writes. In response to my linking to a few ephemeral texts of my own on this blog like this recent Facebook-WordPress-mash-up, she writes after devouring my word-pieces:

Marcus, I read the texts you link in the passage above and find them all to be good as in edible. We need to be careful, lest we repeat ourselves for free. Jonah Lehrer repeated himself for pay.

I’m not so concerned about repeating myself though I’ve been a spitfire against Lehrer myself in this post. But let’s look at this very article. The process:

…using largely the infrastructure that I’ve laid out visually elsewhere. One difference to Lehrer’s example is the transparency and the desire to add to my own thought by rewriting while making the process visible for myself and for others. This can get tedious. It must not go on for too long. Twitter is, in many respects, a more able medium for textual mash-ups. Penny Goring does this well. She tweets things like:

i dreamt i was walking around greenwich with live white tigers draped around me they were happy to be my accessories

I’ve met Penny in London and she’s not exaggerating. Her waist is a wasteland of weirdness but with her words she will grow hair on your tongue. When I turn to Twitter, I poeticize, which is like downsized, chewed up poetry (like here or here).

Echnaton (Amenhopis IV): way ahead of his time.

I accept the need for imitation and repetition. When I alter my ways it is to avoid perishing of being bored with myself. Social media themselves seem to be built more on repetition and endless sharing of minimally different experiences than on originality and creativity. Post anything too creative or too original, anything too many steps ahead of the curve or the herd or the movement… and you will soon be alone on your blog or on your timeline. This makes a lot of evolutionary sense. It also makes Freudian sense. But that’s possibly a new discussion altogether.

How experimental do you feel today? Whatever you’ve got in mind, bogle it & don’t be goring about it.

]]>http://marcusspeh.com/2013/06/28/bogles-bricolage/feed/852.544667 13.41462552.54466713.414625396px-Echnatonmarcusspeh"Monk by the sea", Caspar David Friedrich (1808)Bogle Bricolage diagramEchnaton (Amenhopis IV): way ahead of his time.